The Voice That Stayed

how I carried your absence until I recognized it as love

You left before I understood the shape a father’s voice makes when it settles in a room. How it leans against the silence like a steady hand on the back of a chair. I was just beginning to stretch into myself when you became a memory, with edges too soft to hold. A warmth I couldn’t name, but still felt on cold days.

I remember more of the absence than the man. but I’ve filled it with the way I imagine you smiled at me when I wasn’t looking. How you might have said my name, with the weight of pride folded into it, like a secret note I never found.

Time keeps rewriting our unfinished story. Each year, another guess at who we might have been to each other. But I carry you!

Not just in the mirror or my hands (that look a little like yours), but in every quiet strength I didn’t know had a source. Then I realized you were the beginning of so much I thought I made on my own.

Still, I wish you could see me now. Not for approval, just presence. Because for months, I carried the weight like it was mine to bear. As if a teenage heart could’ve held back fate. As if love could’ve bargained with death. I blamed myself in every silent moment, searching for a reason you were gone. The only name I had to shout was my own.

But time, in its slow mercy, has softened that ache. Not erased! Just made room for other truths. Like how grief is not a punishment, but a tether to what mattered.

And maybe, if there’s such a thing as the light we leave behind, you know I’ve tried. You know I still miss you and somehow you’ve forgiven what I never needed to be guilty for.

Sometimes, when the room is still, I swear I hear your voice. Not loud, just there, like a steady hand on the back of a chair!